Monthly Archives: April 2016

More and more lately, I’m asked the question “what do you do?” This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Often, how I answer depends on who’s asking – is it someone who really cares or needs to know? – and how much detail I feel like going to at the moment when I’m asked. When I’m asked at conferences, as I was quite a bit at FORCE2016, I tried to be as explanatory as possible without getting pedantic, boring, or long-winded. My answer in those scenarios goes something like “I’m a data librarian – I do a lot of instruction on data science, like R and data visualization, and data management.” When I’m asked in more social contexts, I hardly even bother explaining. Depending on my mood and the person who’s asking, I’ll usually say something like data scientist, medical librarian, or, if I really don’t feel like talking about it, just librarian. It’s hard to know how to describe yourself when you have a job title that is pretty obscure: Research Data Informationist. I would venture to guess that 99% of my family, friends, and even work colleagues have little to no idea what I actually spend my days doing.

In some regards, that’s fine. Does it really matter if my mom and dad know what it means that I’ve taught hundreds of scientists R? Not really (they’re still really proud, though!). Do I care if my date has a clear understanding of what a data librarian does? Not really. Do I care if a random person I happen to chat with while I’m watching a hockey game at my local gets the nuances of the informationist profession? Absolutely not.

On the other hand, there are often times that I wish I had a somewhat more scrutable job title. When I’m talking to researchers at my institution, I want them to know what I do because I want them to know when to ask me for help. I want them to know that the library has someone like me who can help with their data science questions, their data management needs, and so on. I know it’s not natural to think “library” when the question is “how do I get help with finding data” or “I need to learn R and don’t know where to start” or “I’d like to create a data visualization but I have no idea how to do it” or any of the other myriad data-related issues I or my colleagues could address.

The “informationist” term is one that has a clear definition and a history within the realm of medical librarianship, but I feel like it has almost no meaning outside of our own field. I can’t even count the number of weird variations I’ve heard on that title – informaticist, informationalist, informatist, and many more. It would be nice to get to the point that researchers understood what an informationist is and how we can help them in their work, but I just don’t see that happening in the near future.

So what do we do to make our contributions and expertise and status as potential collaborators known? What term can we call ourselves to make our role clear? Librarian doesn’t really do it, because I think people have a very stereotypical and not at all correct view of what librarians do, and it doesn’t capture the data informationist role at all. Informationist doesn’t do it, because no one has any clue what that means. I’ve toyed with calling myself a data scientist, and though I do think that label fits, I have some reservations about using that title, probably mostly driven by a terrible case of imposter syndrome.

What’s in a name? A lot, I think. How can data librarians, informationists, library-based data scientists, whatever you want to call us, communicate our role, our expertise, our services, to our user communities? Is there a better term for people who are doing this type of work?

I’m attending FORCE2016, which is my first FORCE11 conference after following this movement (or group?) for awhile and I have to say, this is one interesting, thought-provoking conference. I haven’t been blogging in awhile, but I felt inspired to get a few thoughts down after the first day of FORCE2016:

I love the interdisciplinarity of this conference, and to me, that’s what makes it a great conference to attend. In our “swag bag,” we were all given a “passport” and could earn extra tickets for getting signatures of attendees from different disciplines and geographic locations. While free drinks are of course a great incentive, I think the fact that we have so many diverse attendees at this conference is a draw on its own. I love that we are getting researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, and so many other stakeholders at the table, and I can’t think of another conference where I’ve seen this many different types of people from this many countries getting involved in the conversatioon.

I actually really love that there are so few concurrent sessions. Obviously, fewer concurrent sessions means fewer voices joining the official conversation, but I think this is a small enough conference that there are ways to be involved, active, and vocal without necessarily being an invited speaker. While I love big conferences like MLA, I always feel pulled in a million different directions – sometimes literally, like last year when I was scheduled to present papers at two different sessions during the same time period. I feel more engaged at a conference when I’m seeing mostly the same content as others. We’re all on the same page and we can have better conversations. I also feel more engaged in the Twitter stream. I’m not trying to follow five, ten, or more tweet streams at once from multiple sessions. Instead, I’m seeing lots of different perspectives and ideas and feedback on one single session. I like us all being on the same page.

Now, those are some positives, but I do have to bring it down with one negative from this conference, and that is that I think it’s hard to constructively talk about how to encourage sharing and open science when you have a whole conference full of open science advocates. I do not in any way want to disparage anyone because I have a lot of respect for many of the participants in the session I’m talking about, but I was a little disappointed in the final session today on data management. I loved the idea of an interactive session (plus I heard there would be balloons and chocolate, so, yeah!) and also the idea of debate on topics in data sharing and management, since that’s my jam. I did debate in high school, so I can recognize the difficulty but also the usefulness of having to argue for a position with which you strongly disagree. There’s real value in spending some time thinking about why people hold positions that are in opposition of your strongly held position. And yeah, this was the last session of a long day, and it was fun, and it had popping of balloons, and apparently some chocolate, and whatnot, but I am a little disappointed at what I see as a real missed opportunity to spend some time really discussing how we can address some of the arguments against data sharing and data management. Sure, we all laughed at the straw men that were being thrown out there by the teams who were being called upon to argue in favor of something that they (and all of us, as open science advocates) strongly disagreed with. But I think we really lost an opportunity to spend some time giving serious thought to some of the real issues that researchers who are not open science advocates actually raise. Someone in that session mentioned the open data excuses bingo page (you can find it here if you haven’t seen it before). Again, funny, but SERIOUSLY I have actually have real researchers say ALL of these things, except for the thing about terrorists. I will reiterate that I know and respect a lot of people involved with that session and I’m not trying to disparage them in any way, but I do hope we can give some real thought to some of the issues that were brought up in jest today. Some of these excuses, or complaints, or whatever, are actual, strongly-held beliefs of many, many researchers. The burden is on us, as open science advocates, to demonstrate why data sharing, data management, and the like are tenable positions and in fact the “correct” choice.

Okay, off my soap box! I’m really enjoying this conference, having a great time reconnecting with people I’ve not seen in years, and making new connections. And Portland! What a great city. 🙂

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Librarian in the City is the personal blog of Lisa Federer. The thoughts expressed here are my own and do not reflect the opinion of my employer. Likewise, comments are the views of readers who submit them, and do not necessarily reflect my own opinions.